(Ed.) (2014) the Oxford Handbook of Science Fiction, New York: Oxford University Press, Pp.35-46
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Chapter 2 – from Rob Latham (ed.) (2014) The Oxford Handbook of Science Fiction, New York: Oxford University Press, pp.35-46. Aesthetics Peter Stockwell The problem of a science fictional aesthetic Science fiction is extremely diverse as a genre, encompassing a wide range of narrative types and expressive patterns: you will find stories cast in the form of crime and detective puzzles, theological and philosophical explorations, ripping yarns, shoot-outs and battles and meditative extrapolations; both pacy narrative drive and lyrical contemplation; characters that resonate as rich fictional people and characters that are everyman tokens and plot devices. You will find magical realism, modern gothic, postmodernism and the absurd, omniscient narration and psychological stream of consciousness; the registers of action-adventure, experimental narrative, science, humour and psychobabble; stories both heavy with demotic dialogue and elsewhere brimming with specialized terminology; and a rich and still- expanding set of sub-genres across the many media forms of print and screen. All of this diversity makes it very difficult to delineate a single unifying aesthetic that can be said to identify science fiction as a cultural phenomenon. However, it seems to me that this is a fault of our traditional understanding of aesthetics, rather than a problem unique to science fiction. Though the term aesthetics gained widespread usage only in the late 18th century, drawn from Greek into German and thence to English, over the course of several thousand years of history different thinkers have expressed their views of literary art in many diverse ways as well. We can identify several usages. Firstly, at its most scholarly, aesthetics has been the term that encompasses discussions of artistic value, based on setting out the principles and beliefs that underscore a particular art object or movement: this is aesthetics as philosophy (Janaway 2006, McMahon 2007). Secondly, aesthetic discussions have often centred on considerations of the nature of beauty and the measurement of a particular work of art: this is aesthetics as (literary) criticism (Armstrong 2000, Gumbrecht 2004). Beyond the academy, however, there are several other fields of commentary that treat aesthetics in a different sense. The beauty or otherwise of an artwork can be considered not only in terms of its own properties nor in terms of its creative intentions but also for the effect it has on a viewer or culture: this treats the aesthetic value of a work in terms of its social impact. Finally, there is a sense in which the aesthetic of an object relates in journalistic and popular usage to the ‘look and feel’ of the work: this is aesthetics as fashion. Across these different senses and applications within the field of literature, in general there is a set of uses that pertains to the internal properties and features of the literary text, and another related set that inclines towards the generic and social positioning of the work. To give a simple example, here are the openings to five short stories from the same collection by science fiction writer Roger Zelazny (1971): 1 1. I’m a baitman. No one is born a baitman, except in a French novel where everyone is. (In fact, I think that’s the title, We are All Bait. Pfft!) How I got that way is barely worth the telling and has nothing to do with neo-exes, but the days of the beast deserve a few words, so here they are. Roger Zelazny (1971) ‘The Doors of His Face, the Lamps of His Mouth’ 2. Born of man and woman, in accordance with Catform Y7 requirements, Coldworld Class (modified per Alyonal), 3.2-E, G.M.I. option, Jarry Dark was not suited for existence anywhere in the universse which had guaranteed him a niche. This was either a blessing or a curse, depending on how you looked at it. So look at it however you would, here is the story: ‘The Keys to December’ 3. ‘... I is this ?hearers wounded-wonder like stand them makes and stars wandering the conjures sorrow of phrase Whose...’ He blew smoke through the cigarette and it grew longer. ‘Divine Madness’ 4. Drax and Dran sat in the great Throne Hall of Glan, discussing life. Monarchs by virtue of superior intellect and physique – and the fact that they were the last two survivors of the race of Glan – theirs was a divided rule over the planet and their one subject, Zindrome, the palace robot. ‘The Great Slow Kings’ 5. I was busy translating one of my Madrigals Macabre into Martian on the morning I was found acceptable. The intercom had buzzed briefly, and I dropped my pencil and flipped on the toggle in a single motion. ‘A Rose for Ecclesiastes’ On the social and cultural dimension, Zelazny is widely regarded as a ‘literary’ science fiction author (Yoke 1979, 1985, Lindskold 1993), with an MA in Renaissance literature and with a style of writing that often blended classical mythologies, literary allusion and quotations from French, Latin and Greek. The first example above illustrates the blend of what appears to be scholarly and literate allusion with a demotic dialogic style, and even a science fictional neologism (‘neo-exes’). Excerpt 2 exemplifies the immersive and idiomatic style that can often be found in science fictional openings. Like the first extract (‘a few words, so here they are’), the introduction refers to itself as text (‘here is the story’), which is both conversational and self-consciously artsy, and it blends conversational idioms with technical terms that the experienced sf reader might decode: a genetically modified person in the form of a Cat suited for Alyonal, a cold planet which has 3.2 times Earth gravity. Excerpt 3 is the most literate and self-conscious of all, with graphological marking drawing attention to the opening sentence in italics and reversed word-order: corrected, it is a quotation from Shakespeare’s Hamlet. It retains internally the science fictional suggestion in ‘stars’, and then introduces an oddity in the sentence that describes the smoked cigarette 2 growing longer. The reversal is iconic in the rest of the story, which deals with a character who – between seizures – lives backwards through the immediate future, in what turns out to be a redemptive love story. Excerpt 4 displays the grandiose register of overblown mythological science fiction, quickly undermined in bathos. The final extract immerses the reader into the futuristic world, presented as if it were familiar – a common technique in sf which is here lyrically enriched with the alliterative ‘m’ and the anachronistic blend of pencil and toggle. These examples have been selected here because they neatly illustrate – within one book – several different features of science fictional writing within a text. Any comprehensive aesthetics of science fiction would have to allow a principled account of all of these features, and more, and also recognize that Zelazny is at one, literate and allusive end of a spectrum that stretches to more action-driven and one-dimensional examples of formulaic genre fiction. One possible way of dealing with genre-diversity would be to work out different aesthetic principles for the different forms of sf. So we could explain separately the characteristically appealing features and effects of the writing of the inter-war US pulp magazines, or the British 1960s New Wave, or 1980s cyberpunk, and so on. However, this approach neglects to recognize the intuitive sense shared by many readers that sf is generically and wholly a particular thing. Sub-genres have family resemblance with each other, even if those at extended ends of the spectrum appear superficially dissimilar. An alternative is to claim that sf is not easily amenable to the customary perspectives of literary scholarship, because the latter arose alongside a literature of character, lyrical sensibility and artistic self-reference that has diverged from the history of sf writing. Science fiction therefore requires its own, bespoke scholarly aesthetic account. The most famous proponents of this position are the sf authors and critics Samuel Delany (1977, 1984) and Joanna Russ (1975). Delany argues that science fiction is necessarily and by definition richer (an aesthetic judgement) than what he terms ‘mundane’ fiction because of its greater potential for possibilities that are not restricted to natural realism or the parochial and everyday. However, this position is an evaluation of poetics rather than aesthetics, properly. The enhanced richness is a matter of a larger scope for propositional content and meaning; Delany does not claim that sf allows a wider or qualitatively different intensity of emotional attachment than other literary art. Russ (1975: 112) contrasts the emphasis and value placed in literary criticism on lyrical intensity with the ‘drastically different form of literary art’ of sf. She describes science fiction as essentially didactic rather than contemplative, with characters that are collective or representational rather than individual psychologies, with an emphasis on phenomena and possessing a quality that is awed, worshipful and generally religious in tone. Criticism of science fiction cannot possibly look like the criticism we are used to. It will – perforce – employ an aesthetic in which the elegance, rigorousness, and systematic coherence of explicit ideas is of great importance. (Russ 1975: 118) This position might appeal to anyone with a rebellious or contrarian streak who enjoys being an sf fan as an act of alternativity, but there is something of the ghetto and special pleading about it. Treating sf as essentially a different form of art only serves to marginalise it even 3 further, rather than dealing directly with the common processes of aesthetic perception that we all share. It is not psychologically plausible to imagine a separate type of reading and appreciative process evolved solely for sf, and it is not socially plausible to separate sf out from the continuity of other human experience whether of literature or art or life in general.